We Are Suffering From a Social Recession, Too.

We Are Suffering From a Social Recession, Too.
(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

New Yorkers are used to hearing sirens. And then came March’s round-the-clock ambulance wails, every hour of every day. Through the barred windows of my Brooklyn apartment, I watched the streets empty as an unseen contagion drove us inside.

Before the razor wire and guard dogs on Fifth Avenue, before the mass graves in the city’s potter’s field, New York was not perfect, but we had each other. Now, it seems, we are united only by fear and loneliness. “People don’t have anything to lose,” cried one looter smashing the windows on a Duane Reade drugstore in Lower Manhattan this past May. “In the right circumstances, ka-boom.” I’d like to believe he’s wrong.

Covid-19 has targeted not only our lives, but our life together as Americans. As of mid-August 2020, some 165,000 Americans have died from Covid-19; roughly 50 million people are out of work and a third are not making their full housing payments on time; millions of children will likely not be returning to school this fall; and a third of practicing Christians have stopped going to church.

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